From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States

by David Hounshell

Overview

"In From the American System to Mass Production, David A. Hounshell has provided a detailed, thoughtful, and comprehensive examination of American industrial technology from the early 1800s through the 1930s. Lavishly illustrated with 19th-century prints and more recent photographs of factory interiors and industrial products, this important work traces the direct and indirect routes down the road toward modern American industrial civilization. For business and labor historians and for historians of American technology and industrialization, Hounshell's book will fill many gaps in the history of the technical contours of modern industrial America... [the book] begins with an examination of the origins of the American system of manufactures in government and private arms production and then moves to the sewing machine, woodworking, agricultural equipment, bicycle, and automobile industries. It touches on the important inventors and innovators and describes their fundamental contributions in these American industries. Most of the principal figures and institutions are covered: Simeon North, Eli Whitney, Thomas Blanchard, John H. Hall, and Samuel Colt in armories, Eli Terry and Seth Thomas in the clockmaking industry, the Wheeler and Wilson, Willcox and Gibbs, and Singer sewing machine firms, the Singer woodworking plant, the McCormick Reaper works, the Columbia, Pope, and Western Wheel Works bicycle companies, and the Ford and General Motors automotive corporations... Hounshell's work is a major contribution to the social history of technical innovators and their innovations... All in all, From the American System to Mass Production is an impressive work. In his documentation of the history of American industrial technology, Hounshell has demonstrated the slow evolution and the near-failure of large-scale, capital-intensive, and work-degrading industrial systems. Whereas other historians of technology have tended to tread too lightly on the social dimensions of technical change, Hounshell has provided an excellent social analysis of the networks of innovators and their role in the diffusion of armory practices and other industrial advances from industry to industry." — Technology and Culture

"Mr. Hounshell is an enthusiastic, lively writer, yet very careful scholar. He is cautious in his conclusions and candid about what is debatable. He offers several sides of every issue; he does not judge particular technologies as good or bad... What stands out in this history is how slowly what appears to be a sensible, productive and efficient system of manufacturing was adopted, chiefly because it required a change in the mind-set of managers, changes in skills and work habits of workers, and disciplined procedures and practices throughout the plants." — New York Times Book Review

"David Hounshell's history of the evolution of American production methods has few rivals; in execution of the theme, it has none... Hounshell carefully documents the development, transfer, and modification of the technology of the manufacture of interchangeable parts from firm to firm and industry to industry... A series of excellent technical photographs and Hounshell's own field trials support his argument." — Science

"[A] meticulous study of mass production's roots and early flowering... An able researcher, [Hounshell] follows the trail of early manufacturing ideas and shows how they were gradually perfected and diffused throughout different industries before converging in Ford's miracle at Highland Park." — Wall Street Journal

"[An] important study which offers a convincing reinterpretation of the development of mass production in the United States. [Hounshell] has combined substantial new archival research with a synthesis of the mass of new work completed by others in the past three decades." — Journal of Economic History

Product Details

BN ID:	2940185780763
Publisher:	Plunkett Lake Press
Publication date:	11/25/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Born in Colorado in 1950, David Allen Hounshell grew up in southeastern New Mexico. He majored in electrical engineering at Southern Methodist University (BSEE, 1972) and subsequently studied history at the University of Delaware, earning his PhD in 1978. His earliest scholarship in the history of technology was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Smithsonian Institution, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.

Hounshell is David M. Roderick Professor, Emeritus, of Technology and Social Change at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is a member of the Department of Social & Decision Sciences and the Department of Engineering & Public Policy. His teaching career at Carnegie Mellon spanned more than twenty-five years. He served previously on the faculties of Harvey Mudd College (1977-79) and the University of Delaware (1977-91), was a guest professor at the Deutsches Museum in Munich (1991), and Chalmers Technological University in Gothenburg, Sweden (1998), and held a Marvin Bower Fellowship at Harvard Business School (1977-78). In addition to his book From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932, Hounshell co-authored Science and Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902-1980. He has also published works on 19th century electrical inventors, Cold War era scientific and engineering research, government-funded computer innovation, and environmentally-related technology forcing.

Hounshell was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and served as president of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). He was awarded SHOT’s highest honor, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 2007 and its Dexter Book Prize in 1987 for From the American System to Mass Production, was a recipient of the Business History Conference’s Harold Williamson Medal (1992) and its Newcomen Society Book Prize for Science and Corporate Strategy, and named the IEEE’s Browder J. Thompson Award recipient in 1978 for an article on the simultaneous invention of the telephone in the Proceedings of the IEEE. Hounshell is a Life Member of IEEE.

At Carnegie Mellon, Hounshell directed the NSF-funded Graduate Research and Training Program in Cold War Science and Technology in the Department of History (late 1990s to early 2000s). He directed or co-directed the dissertations of almost thirty students in history, entrepreneurship, and engineering & public policy.